Failed Obamacare Bill Will Get House Do-Over

A month after House Republican leaders were forced to pull an unpopular Obamacare revision from the House floor, bill sponsor Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said he expects to see a modified version under consideration again in “a couple of weeks.”

The reworked measure appears designed to mollify critics in the rank and file who argued that the bill, as introduced, would have, in effect, just bolstered the president’s signature health care law rather than repealed its provisions.

In its original form, the bill would have taken $3.7 billion from the 2010 health care law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund and directed that money toward allowing people with pre-existing conditions to continue enrolling in high-risk insurance pools. The White House has put a moratorium on enrollment in preparation for the 2014 launch of state-run insurance exchanges that will offer such coverage.

The revamped legislation, meanwhile, would completely zero out the Prevention and Public Health Fund, Pitts told CQ Roll Call on Wednesday.

About $8.5 billion in savings incurred by repealing the fund would go toward deficit reduction, Pitts continued, and the rest would go to states to run their own high-risk pools or create new ones.

“It goes to the states. It’s under their discretion,” he said.

It could make the bill more likely to pass muster with conservative members of the Republican Conference who were under pressure from the Club for Growth and The Heritage Foundation to vote against it. The Club for Growth and The Heritage Foundation both pledged to score a vote on the original legislation, saying it improved the law rather than repealed it.

On Wednesday, Pitts emphasized that repealing the prevention fund is critical because the administration has used some of its funding to implement other parts of the law.

“They’re using it as the implementation fund for Obamacare,” he said. “Basically $54 million was taken to hire navigators to sign up people. They’re using $304 million for an advertising, media campaign on Obamacare. And they’ve used it for all kinds of other grants.”

When GOP leaders halted floor consideration on April 24, they pledged to take members’ concerns into consideration and rework some of the language to make it more palatable.

At that time, House Republican Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., said he had heard from some colleagues that they had concerns with the bill helping only a certain group of people and not all those who feel threatened by the law. He also said that colleagues might be more inclined to vote for the bill if they were first able to vote on full repeal of the law.

House leadership heeded that call May 16, when it held an up-or-down Obamacare repeal vote. Meanwhile, Rory Cooper, spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., demurred when questioned whether this vote was intended to be an olive branch of sorts to pave the way for the high-risk pool bill to return to the floor.

In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Cooper said the revised bill would address promises made in the health care law on which President Barack Obama has reneged.

“[He] has broken many of his fundamental health care promises, including helping those with pre-existing conditions,” Cooper said. “So House Republicans remain committed to ensuring those suffering with illness and disease are helped, and not left behind by the failed Obamacare law.”

Abortion Bill Could Hurt All House Republicans, Bono Mack Says

The conservative base is clamoring for the House to consider its first abortion-related bill of the 113th Congress, but at least one ousted GOP moderate is sounding an alarm about the political dangers for her party.

Former Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who lost her 2012 re-election bid to Democrat Raul Ruiz, said the House’s renewed focus on a Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy will likely hurt the party’s efforts to build a broader base.

“People who are in districts that are tighter, or people who, in my view, read the bill, will see that it is too extreme,” Bono Mack, now a senior vice president at FaegreBD Consulting, said in an interview with CQ Roll Call.  “The whole party is trying so hard to reach out to people who are not in the party right now. … This is one of those things where people who are on the fence, looking at both parties, deciding which one they like, they might look at this bill and say, ‘I just might not go there. This is a little too far for me.’”

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‘Conferencia GOP’ Reaches Out to Latinos in New Video

The Republican Party, long-marooned from the Latino voting bloc, has begun a concerted effort to mobilize this constituency as its own, particularly ahead of the 2014 and 2016 elections.

The most recent attempt at making its message resonate with Hispanic voters comes from the House, where GOP leadership has harnessed its new-media savvy to create an outreach video starring its Spanish-speaking members.

The House Republican Conference unveiled its latest Spanish-language video Wednesday, which features California Reps. Jeff Denham and David Valadao, along with Florida Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Trey Radel.

Titled “Energía Norteamericana,” or “American Energy,” the 1-minute, 42-second video highlights “the importance of an all-American energy plan that would create jobs and unleash countless opportunities for the Hispanic community,” according to a Republican Conference press release.

“With more than 2 million Latinos looking for work, we need more jobs, we need more opportunities, and we need them now,” say the lawmakers, according to a translation provided by the Republican Conference. “Tapping into American energy would unleash countless job opportunities. It would create jobs, lower prices at the pump and give all of us a more secure future.

“Republicans are working every day to improve people’s lives in our communities and create more jobs,” they say. “An all-American energy plan would do just that.”

The House Republican Conference’s Spanish-language video is not the first of its kind. The “Conferencia GOP” has its own YouTube channel, and it also maintains its own Twitter handle.

This particular video’s release, however, coincides with this week’s House floor consideration of legislation that would allow construction on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to commence without the need for a permit from the White House.

While critics argue the pipeline would have devastating environmental effects, supporters say it would maximize America’s access to cheaper energy sources and in general contribute to a more robust U.S. economy.

Boehner: Oklahoma Tornado Victims Will Get Relief

(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Speaker John A. Boehner is vowing that Oklahoma tornado victims will get relief — but he demurred on when and how the House might act on a bill, and whether his conference would support it.

“We’ll work with the administration on making sure they have the resources they need,” the Ohio Republican told reporters.

He repeated that promise, nearly verbatim, three times to each of the three questions he agreed to entertain from reporters at a leadership press briefing Tuesday morning.

He wouldn’t elaborate on when leaders might introduce a disaster relief package in the wake of the devastating tornado. Nor would he comment on whether sending financial aid to the storm’s victims would be a tough sell to his conference, which in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy put up a fight against any relief bill that didn’t have significant offsets.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has already said he will demand offsets for disaster relief, a position he’s consistently held through the years.

Boehner wouldn’t permit the three Oklahoma Republicans in attendance — Reps. James Lankford, Frank D. Lucas and Jim Bridenstine — to field reporters’ inquiries.

House Republicans have struggled in the past to stay unified on disaster relief, a struggle that could continue if a relief bill is needed beyond the billions already in disaster relief accounts and doesn’t come with new budget cuts.

During the fight for Sandy relief, the overwhelmingly Democratic New York and New Jersey delegations had no trouble getting support from their caucus peers. It was New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King who famously broke party lines and publicly told fundraisers not to donate any more money to the Republican Party until they agreed to stop stonewalling the relief bill.

On Tuesday morning, though, Boehner appeared determined to divert attention from the politics of what comes next to acknowledgment of the reality of the tragedy. He and other members of Republican leadership — Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California; Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Conference Vice Chairwoman Lynn Jenkins of Kansas — spoke in somber tones about the American spirit of coming together to mourn, pray and rebuild. Boehner, visibly affected, said he had ordered the House flags to be flown at half-staff.

Lankford, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, and Lucas, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, gave brief remarks on the tragedy that had befallen their home state before the question-and-answer session in which they did not participate.

“Understand,” Lucas said, “we will rebuild, and we in the delegation will work with our fellow Oklahomans to make sure they have the ability to do that.”

Q&A With Gov. Brian Sandoval (Part II)

CARSON CITY, Nev. — Gov. Brian Sandoval has cut a lower, less-partisan profile than many Republican chiefs executive.

But as a Hispanic Republican and the relatively popular leader of a Western swing state that sided with President Barack Obama last November, Sandoval might be uniquely qualified to offer his party political advice as it seeks to recover in the wake of the disappointing 2012 elections.

In part two of our discussion pulled from my wide-ranging interview conducted earlier this week in the governor’s private office in Nevada’s historic Capitol, Sandoval sounded off on how efforts to change U.S. immigration law might affect the GOP nationally, and what he really thought when 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about “self deportation” as an immigration policy.

The governor revealed some of his thinking about the political landscape at home ahead of the 2014 and 2016 elections and discussed how the actions of the Congress and the White House, or lack thereof, have affected his ability to help Nevada recover from an economic downturn that was felt more acutely in the Silver State than perhaps any other state in the nation.

And we closed the interview with a short segment on Sandoval’s choice of footwear — and discovered a Capitol Hill connection.

Q. Over time, will the Senate immigration reform proposal help the image of the GOP with different ethnic demographics?

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Boehner Wants Debt Limit Talks With Obama

Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, said Thursday that the White House should be prepared to negotiate with House Republicans on the debt limit – despite President Barack Obama’s insistence that he wants to extend it later this summer without strings attached.

“It’s easy to make a statement to that effect,” Boehner said of Obama at his Thursday morning news conference ,”but it’s just not reality.”

Of course, Boehner himself does not appear to have settled on exactly what he would be negotiating for, considering House GOP members emerged from Wednesday’s debt limit brainstorming session without a consensus on what to fight for.

Still, Boehner indicated that House Republicans would likely be seeking deeper spending cuts. “The fact is, that if the Treasury Department needs to pay the bills, the debt limit has to be dealt with, and should be dealt with in a responsible way,” he said. “[Obama] can’t continue to increase the debt limit without doing something about what’s driving the increase in the debt limit, and that is out of control spending.”

Boehner also took the opportunity to tout the House’s vote, set for later in the day, on a bill that would fully repeal Obamacare, the third of its kind since the GOP gained control of the chamber in 2011.

Standing beside the now-infamous, seven-foot “Red Tape Tower,” he gestured to the thousands of pages stacked on top of the other, tied with a red ribbon and balanced on a red hand-cart.

“These are the thousands and thousands of health care regulations,” Boehner explained. “And if we want jobs, we need to get rid of this, because this is getting in the way of employers hiring workers around the country.”

Boehner’s news conference also included mention of the two major scandals that have wreaked havoc on the Obama administration this week, namely revelations that the IRS inappropriately targeted conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status and that the Justice Department seized records from Associated Press phone lines.

“Nothing dissolves the bonds between people and their government like the arrogance of power here in Washington,” Boehner said. “And that’s what the American people are seeing today from the Obama administration: remarkable arrogance.

“This house will stop at nothing to get to the American people the answers that they expect,” he continued. “But the best way to repair this damage is for the Obama administration to come forward with the truth — the whole truth — so that the American people will have all the facts.”

Reinvigorated Tea Party Bands Together Against IRS

Tea party leaders banded together Thursday morning to sound a rallying cry for the first time since news broke last week that the IRS disproportionately scrutinized conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status.

Convened by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., former presidential candidate and chairwoman of the House Tea Party Caucus, the news conference outside the Capitol included tea party allies in the House and Senate, national leaders and representatives from local groups around the country.

Their rhetoric left little room to wonder how they feel about the recent developments.

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, called for an audit of the IRS, which she described as “thuggish.” Adam Brandon, the executive vice president of FreedomWorks, said the government was operating more like “a third world junta than a constitutional republic.”

“It’s an abuse of power, potentially by this administration, to advance their own political ends,” Bachmann told a crowd of reporters afterward. “And story after story after story leads one to the conclusion, based upon the presumptive evidence, that the administration was willing to misuse and abuse government power to advance its own re-election chances in the next election. That’s wrong.”

Lawmakers and political organizers pledged one after another that this is an issue that won’t temper a roaring boil anytime soon, and that they would continue to speak out until they had answers.

They were also joined by pro bono attorneys on Thursday, a clear signal that the voices of those targeted by the IRS will only grow louder.

“They lost funding, they lost donors,” said Jordan Sekulow, the executive director for the American Center for Law and Justice. “We have a group out of Tennessee that lost a $3,000 donation because they weren’t approved.

“There are monetary damages here. Events had to be canceled. Attorney fees before they hired us … groups hired local attorneys and were not allowed to even operate once they got approved,” Sekulow said.

Though revelations about IRS misconduct became public May 10, conservative organizations have been voicing concerns beginning around February 2012, at which point 27 of them became clients of Sekulow’s group.

House GOP Still Struggling for Consensus on Debt Limit

They talked about balancing the budget in 10 years, repealing Obamacare, slashing spending and overhauling the tax code.

In other words, the House Republican meeting Wednesday afternoon to brainstorm a path forward for dealing with the debt limit basically consisted of “a laundry list of everything imaginable,” in the words of Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah.

That isn’t to say it was a surprise, or a disappointment. Leading up to the GOP leadership-convened conference, lawmakers said that they expected it to be a listening session rather than a strategy meeting on what demands they should bring to the negotiating table as a condition of raising the debt ceiling.

Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., said Tuesday that he didn’t anticipate consensus around a single idea, but that perhaps “instead of 10 options, maybe we’ll come out with three or four.”

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Issa Schedules IRS Hearing

The Oversight and Government Reform Committee has scheduled a hearing for next week on allegations of misconduct within the IRS, the panel’s chairman, Darrell Issa, confirmed Wednesday.

The California Republican announced the May 22 hearing date to a small group of reporters following a weekly meeting of the House GOP Conference.

It will come just days after the hearing the Ways and Means Committee has set for this Friday.

However, Issa stressed that the two panels would ultimately be seeking answers to different questions relating to charges that the IRS disproportionately targeted the applications of conservative groups with certain signifiers, such as “tea party,” in their names.

“There are a number of various ways in which Ways and Means has unique jurisdiction,” Issa explained of the committee responsible for overseeing the nation’s tax policies, among other things, “but I think for the American people, they want the facts of transparency.

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House GOP ‘Gang of 6′ Slams Senate’s ‘Gang of 8′ Immigration Bill

As the Senate Judiciary Committee continues to debate the immigration overhaul measure authored by the bipartisan “gang of eight,” a more informal and more partisan “gang of six” gathered outside the Capitol to slam what it called an “amnesty bill.”

The cadre of House Republicans, led by Rep. Steve King of Iowa, held a Tuesday morning news conference to weigh in on how to address the nation’s population of undocumented immigrants.

The answer, group members said, is to start by securing the borders before passing any bill that attempts a comprehensive overhaul.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said that President Barack Obama wants to offer legal status to any immigrant without discretion and have that be the condition on which he agrees to secure the border.

“[It is] hypothetically like some random president saying, ‘Hey media, if you don’t write good stories, I’m gonna be going into your phone records on a regular basis until you start,’ just hypothetically, or like, ‘Hey groups, you gotta get off my back or I’m going to harass you with the IRS,’” Gohmert said referencing two scandals within President Barack Obama’s administration: one dealing with the Justice Department seizure of Associated Press phone records, and another involving the IRS inappropriately targeting applications from conservative organizations.

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Pelosi Injects Campaign Finance Debate Into IRS Scandal

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s two-paragraph statement on allegations that the IRS targeted tea party organizations for extra review could have come from any concerned lawmaker Monday.

But a single sentence tying the IRS’ alleged misconduct with a controversial Supreme Court decision signaled that Democratic leaders see an opening to restart the debate over the nation’s campaign finance system. Full story

Mad Men: Madison Avenue’s Advice to the GOP

Ask the modern day “Mad Men” on New York’s Madison Avenue about the GOP’s efforts to rebrand and they point to the recent episode involving Rep. Don Young’s use of the term “wetback” as a missed opportunity.

Speaker John A. Boehner quickly demanded that the Alaska Republican apologize, but in the following days, his spokesmen did not even respond to emailed questions about whether Young would face any concrete punishment for using the racially offensive term in a radio interview.

“When someone does something like that, it should have been a clear censure,” said Peter Hempel, CEO of DDB New York. “There has to be consequences because otherwise people don’t know what Boehner stands for.”

“You need a high-powered Republican to step forward, authoritatively, and say, ‘That is not me.’ And they really need to throw Don Young over the side. They need to throw him under the bus,” branding consultant Rob Frankel said. “He would be the representative of the old guard. That’s the beauty of this whole thing.” Full story

Boehner Downplays Debt Ceiling Fight as Leverage

Boehner said the GOP may use the debt ceiling increase to push for long-term entitlement changes. (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Speaker John A. Boehner downplayed the importance of the debt ceiling increase in remarks to reporters Thursday, saying it might provide “some” leverage to Republicans to force spending cuts, “but I’m not going to risk the full faith and credit of the federal government.”

Rather than isolating the debt ceiling as an individual point of leverage, Republicans are hinting they’ll use it alongside the sequester cuts and the budget fight to push for long-term entitlement changes.

“We’ve made clear that to get rid of the sequester, we need cuts and reforms that will put us on a path to balance the budget over 10 years. The president is clear that he’s not going to address our entitlement crisis unless we’re willing to raise taxes. I think the tax issue’s been resolved. So at this point in time, I don’t know how we go forward,” the Ohio Republican said.

Republicans are planning an extended closed-door meeting to hammer out their strategy on the debt ceiling and other issues when they return from Easter recess. Boehner and other members of House leadership met on March 14 with a working group of influential conservatives on the issue.

Conservatives in the group are coalescing around demanding changes to entitlements for the debt ceiling increase and said the extended conference session will allow the GOP to “hash out” which reforms they will support.

CPAC: Paul, Rubio Offer GOP Alternate Visions of Uncertain Future

Paul said the Republican Party needs to evolve to appeal to the “Faceb0ok generation” of voters. (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call)

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Sens. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio on Thursday offered the Republican Party a glimpse of alternate futures in dueling speeches that revved up two distinct groups of conservative activists.

Speaking back to back to political activists attending the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Florida’s Rubio offered a broad vision more grounded in the three-legged coalition of social, national security and fiscal conservatives that has defined GOP governing since Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980.

Kentucky’s Paul focused his remarks on constitutional liberty and social libertarianism, specifically calling on the Republican Party to change and evolve from the “stale, moss-covered” party he said it has become into a movement that appeals to the younger “Facebook generation” of voters that he claims questions the viability of Social Security and wants the government to leave them alone.

“I think they were both good speeches,” said Wayne Morgan, a Washington, D.C., activist and consultant sporting a Ken Cuccinelli for Virginia governor sticker. “Rubio’s speech seemed to resound, I would say, with the whole crowd. Paul’s message of freedom, rights, small-government definitely hits most of this crowd.”

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Ryan Budget: The Official Talking Points

House Republicans are only now beginning to take a deeper look at Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan’s fiscal 2014 budget plan. A committee markup to fill in the details is scheduled to begin Wednesday.

In the interim, here are the “talking points” House Budget Committee Republicans have armed their GOP colleagues with:

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